When the First World War broke out an Edinburgh doctor named Elsie Inglis volunteered to treat Britain’s soldiers in France.
The suffragist, eager to show that women were worthy of the vote, was dismissed. “My good lady,” a senior officer told her, “go home and sit still.”
Inglis did nothing of the kind. She formed and led the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, helping the wounded and sick of allies including France, Belgium and Serbia.
More than a century after her death — she returned from the Balkans in 1917, exhausted — a row has erupted over a statue proposed for Edinburgh’s Royal Mile commemorating Inglis in her military-style uniform.
Critics, with celebrity backing, want to focus on her work in maternity care, not war. And they want a woman, not a man, to design the monument.
However, Clea Thompson, her great-great-great niece, said their campaign was missing the point by ignoring the relevance of the uniform Inglis wore.
“Up until the the First World War, women doctors were given diminished roles often only seen as fit to treat women and children,” she said. “The opportunity to serve her country gave Elsie and hundreds of other women in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals their chance to change the course of history.”
And they did. A year after Inglis died the first women got the vote. It was in Serbia, in uniform, that Inglis, already in her 50s, had her greatest impact and made her biggest achievement, Thompson says.
“Besides the wounded Serbian, Austrian and German soldiers, her units treated the local population: women, children and the elderly, whenever they could. In doing so, her units helped control the powerful typhus epidemic which was crippling the country.
“She saved thousands of lives and was taken prisoner of war. Her bravery and courage unparalleled. Her deep humanity, coupled with her medical skills and experience plus her determination to show that women were equal in medical care are the traits which define her life.
“To honour her with a statue in Edinburgh her home city, in uniform, would begin to match the reverence with which she is still held in ‘her beloved Serbia’ today.”
A statue of Inglis has been a long time coming. It is often said that there are more monuments to pets than to women in Scotland’s capital. But the scheme has been beset with controversy, especially after a design competition was cancelled by a charity formed to commemorate the doctor.
Trustees said “the level of vitriol directed by some contributors” was “bordering on the defamatory”. They asked Alexander Stoddart, the King’s Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland and creator of statues of Adam Smith and David Hume in the capital, to do the job. But that did not please everybody.
“In sculptural terms Edinburgh is becoming a theme park for Stoddart,” Nicholas Oddy, of Glasgow School of Art, told STV earlier this week.
The campaign against the current proposal is being led by the sculptor Natasha Phoenix.
She said: “Women’s history is so often invisible and our heroes go undocumented. It’s not just important that women’s stories are told, it is also important whose voices they are told in, or in this case, whose hands and ideas they are shaped with.
“A female gaze is so important to achieve equal representation in art. I think it says everything about where we are with equality, where one establishment man can cancel an open competitive process and hand the commission to another, then completely ignore huge public outcry,” she claimed.
Val McDermid, the crime writer, and Charlie and Craig Reid, of the Proclaimers, have backed Phoenix in a joint letter.
They say it is “deeply disappointing” that a male sculptor was chosen to create the artwork and claimed a decision to exclude female artists from the appointment process was a “continuation of the very systemic biases Elsie Inglis fought against”.
The Reids issued a statement demanding “accuracy” about Inglis while wrongly referring to her as a nurse. They did not respond to a request for comment.
The letter also criticises the proposed statue portraying her in a military-style uniform, which they say was only a small part of her life.
Thompson, 50, a clinical psychologist, said she believed the Inglis family supported the statue as proposed. She added: “Campaigning for this statue to be rejected, or replaced with one’s own design, does seem to represent a conflict of interest in my view.
“I don’t think the sex of the sculptor is relevant criteria but rather the consideration of merit and experience of the sculptor.”
The Stoddart design has been submitted for planning permission. Edinburgh city council declined to comment because the application is still live. Alexander Stoddart was approached for comment.
Plans for a statue of Inglis in Edinburgh have been in the works since 2017 and the row over the use of a male sculptor began in 2022.
